Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial sally on dreams and machines. Naturally I have arrogated the right to plagiarise your helpful comments in what follows, which is an aphoristic synthesis of my understanding of the main points that have emerged thus far. I hope this will be helpful for future discussion.
THE APHORISMS We do not see the mind, we see *through* the mind. What we see through the mind - its contents - is mind-stuff: dreams. Hence dream content - i.e. whatever is capable of being present to us - can't be our ontology - this would be circular (the eye can't see itself). So the brain (i.e. what the eye can see) can't be the mind; but the intuition remains that mind and brain might be correlated by some inclusive conception that would constitute our ontology: Kant's great insight stands. It is similarly obvious that 'identity' theories and the like are non-sense: it would indeed be hard to think of two descriptions less 'identical' than brain-descriptions and mind-descriptions: hence again, any such identification could only be via some singular correlative synthesis. Hence any claim that the mind is literally identical with, or 'inside', the brain can be shown to be false by the simple - if messy - expedient of a scalpel; or else can be unmasked as implicitly dualistic: i.e. the claim is really that 'inside' and 'outside' are not merely different descriptions, but different ontologies. By extension of our individual introspecting, a plurality of minds, and the 'external world' that includes brains, can be conceived as correlated in some way - to be elucidated - in a universal synthesis or context: that context being our mutual ontology. Such a universal context, or in common terms 'what exists', cannot be fully known (i.e. can't be exhausted by description) although - or rather because - it constitutes what we are, and by extension what *everything* is. Nonetheless we may seek a logic of dreaming so far as it goes, and this will indeed be as far as anything goes in the way of knowledge claims. Mathematics may be deployed as a dream-logic: but mathematical physics, restricted to 'physical heuristics', prototypically gets stuck at the level of describing the content and behaviour of dreams, not their genesis. To go further and deeper we need an explicit mathematical specification of dreamers and their dreams, and of generative mechanisms by which dreamers and their dream contents can be constructed. Such a schema will by its nature form an analysis of how we come to believe that we and our world are real, and in what terms: i.e. how we come to know a world in a present and personal manner. Consequently such a schema must subsume within its universe of discourse: being, knowing, perceiving, acting and intending - as the foundations of what it means to be real: i.e. it must be capable of invoking the Cheshire Cat *to the life*, not merely leave its grin hanging in the void. Moving beyond bare analysis and description, any move to universalise and 'realise' the axioms of such a schema is to make a claim on ontological finality. It has not been completely clear (to me) whether COMP necessarily makes such a stipulation on realisation, in the sense of a claim that its axioms *literally are* what is present and personal (i.e. RITSIAR). However I'm coming to suspect that it does not in fact make such a claim, although it allows any one of us to take this as a personal leap of faith, specifically through the acid test of saying yes to the doctor. COMP may turn out to be false in its specific predictions - i.e. empirical tests could rule out the possibility of our being finite machines; or perhaps we can never be sure one way or the other. Nonetheless, the inescapable implication is that any alternative schema must from the outset explicitly and fearlessly address the same problem space or else run foul of the same intractable 0-1-3 person ontological and epistemological issues. This has profound implications for virtually all current cosmological TOEs: i.e. a view from nowhere turns out to be nobody's view. As has been observed in other writings, our understanding remains profoundly obscured and distorted unless we restore the personal to the view from nowhere. Only then can we conceive why indeed there is somewhere rather than nowhere. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
